Estudo sobre a fidedignidade de dados na avaliação pragmática em crianças com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem

O objetivo desse estudo foi verificar o momento com maior fidedignidade de dados do processo de avaliação da linguagem, para realizar o levantamento do perfil pragmático infantil. Participaram cinco crianças, com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem, e idades entre 7 anos e 1 mês e 8 anos e 11 meses. Foram realizados 150 minutos de gravação, em uma situação de interação da criança com a pesquisadora, divididas em cinco sessões individuais de 30 minutos. Houve análise posterior dos dados, segundo o protocolo de habilidades comunicativas verbais (HCV), sendo delineado o perfil pragmático individual de cada filmagem (30 minutos) e de toda a amostra (150 minutos), para a comparação (sessões 1 a 5 x total geral das sessões) dos índices de fidedignidade (IF) e status de confiabilidade (SC). Para o cálculo do IF e do SC, respectivamente, foram realizadas as análises individuais interobservador e intraobservador. Os resultados apresentados pelas crianças 1 e 2 alcançaram maior IF na sessão 2; os da criança 3 apresentaram valores semelhantes de IF nas sessões 3, 4 e 5; os da criança 4 obtiveram o maior IF nas sessões 1 e 3; e os da criança 5 alcançaram o mesmo valor de IF em todas sessões. Com relação ao SC, a sessão 2 apresentou maior porcentagem de altíssima confiabilidade para a maioria das crianças, seguida da sessão 3. Na análise realizada por categoria de HCV, a sessão 3 apresentou maior SC para as habilidades dialógicas, narrativo-discursivas e total geral de HCV. No geral, observa-se que as sessões 2 e 3 foram as que permitiram alcançar maior IF e SC na análise realizada para delineamento do perfil pragmático infantil.

Sulcus anatomy and diameter in pseudophakic eyes and correlation with biometric data: Evaluation with a 50 MHz ultrasound biomicroscope

PURPOSE: To evaluate the sulcus anatomy and possible correlations between sulcus diameter and white-to-white (WTW) diameter in pseudophakic eyes, data that may be important in the stability of add-on intraocular lenses (IOLs). SETTING: University Eye Hospital, Tuebingen, Germany. DESIGN: Case series. METHODS: In pseudophakic eyes, the axial length (AL) and horizontal WTW were measured by the IOLMaster device. Cross-sectional images were obtained with a 50 MHz ultrasound biomicroscope on the 4 meridians: vertical, horizontal (180 degrees), temporal oblique, and nasal oblique. Sulcus-to-sulcus (STS), angle-to-angle (ATA), and sclera-to-sclera (ScTSc) diameters were measured. The IOL optic diameter (6.0 mm) served as a control. To test reliability, optic measurements were repeated 5 times in a subset of eyes. RESULTS: The vertical ATA and STS diameters were statistically significantly larger than the horizontal diameter (P=.0328 and P=.0216, respectively). There was no statistically significant difference in ScTSc diameters. A weak correlation was found between WTW and horizontal ATA (r = 0.5766, P<.0001) and between WTW and horizontal STS (r = 0.5040, P=.0002). No correlation was found between WTW and horizontal ScTSc (r = 0.2217, P=.1217). CONCLUSIONS: The sulcus anatomy had a vertical oval shape with the vertical meridian being the largest, but it also had variation in the direction of the largest meridian. The WTW measurements showed a weak correlation with STS. In pseudophakic eyes, Soemmerring ring or a bulky haptic may affect the ciliary sulcus anatomy.

A feature selection approach for identification of signature genes from SAGE data

Abstract Background One goal of gene expression profiling is to identify signature genes that robustly distinguish different types or grades of tumors. Several tumor classifiers based on expression profiling have been proposed using microarray technique. Due to important differences in the probabilistic models of microarray and SAGE technologies, it is important to develop suitable techniques to select specific genes from SAGE measurements. Results A new framework to select specific genes that distinguish different biological states based on the analysis of SAGE data is proposed. The new framework applies the bolstered error for the identification of strong genes that separate the biological states in a feature space defined by the gene expression of a training set. Credibility intervals defined from a probabilistic model of SAGE measurements are used to identify the genes that distinguish the different states with more reliability among all gene groups selected by the strong genes method. A score taking into account the credibility and the bolstered error values in order to rank the groups of considered genes is proposed. Results obtained using SAGE data from gliomas are presented, thus corroborating the introduced methodology. Conclusion The model representing counting data, such as SAGE, provides additional statistical information that allows a more robust analysis. The additional statistical information provided by the probabilistic model is incorporated in the methodology described in the paper. The introduced method is suitable to identify signature genes that lead to a good separation of the biological states using SAGE and may be adapted for other counting methods such as Massive Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) or the recent Sequencing-By-Synthesis (SBS) technique. Some of such genes identified by the proposed method may be useful to generate classifiers.

Bootstrap confidence intervals for industrial recurrent event data

Industrial recurrent event data where an event of interest can be observed more than once in a single sample unit are presented in several areas, such as engineering, manufacturing and industrial reliability. Such type of data provide information about the number of events, time to their occurrence and also their costs. Nelson (1995) presents a methodology to obtain asymptotic confidence intervals for the cost and the number of cumulative recurrent events. Although this is a standard procedure, it can not perform well in some situations, in particular when the sample size available is small. In this context, computer-intensive methods such as bootstrap can be used to construct confidence intervals. In this paper, we propose a technique based on the bootstrap method to have interval estimates for the cost and the number of cumulative events. One of the advantages of the proposed methodology is the possibility for its application in several areas and its easy computational implementation. In addition, it can be a better alternative than asymptotic-based methods to calculate confidence intervals, according to some Monte Carlo simulations. An example from the engineering area illustrates the methodology.